Yet these old Bostonians the chance visitor to the city rarely, if ever, sees. They are conspicuous by their very absence. He will not find them lunching in the showy restaurants of the Touraine or in its newest competitor farther up Boylston street. They shrink. He may sometime catch a glimpse of a patrician New England countenance behind the window-glass of a carriage-door, or even see the Brahmins quietly walking home from church through the sacred streets of the Back Bay on a Sunday morning, but that is all. The doors of the old houses upon those streets are tightly closed upon him.
But if one of those doors will open ever and ever so tiny a crack to him, it will open full-wide, with the generous width of New England hospitality, and bid him enter. We remember dining in one of these famous old houses two or three seasons ago. It was in the heart of winter—a Boston winter—and the night was capriciously changing from rain to sleet and sleet to rain again. The wind blew in from the sea with that piercing sharpness, so characteristic of Boston. It bent the bare branches of the old trees upon the Common, sent swinging overhead signs to creaking and shrieking in their misery, played sad havoc with unwary umbrellas, and shot the flares from the bracketed gas-lamps along the streets into all manner of fanciful forms. In such a storm we made our way through streets of solid brick houses up the hill to the famous Bulfinch State House and then down again through Mount Vernon street and Louisburg square—highways that once properly flattened might have been taken from Mayfair or Belgravia. Finally our path led to a little street, boasting but eight of the stolid brick houses and arranged in the form of a capital T. The shank of the T gave that little colony its sole access to the remainder of the world.
To one of these eight old houses—an austere fellow and the product of an austere age—we were asked. When its solid door closed behind us, we were in another Boston. Not that the interior of the house belied its stolid front. It was as simple as yellow tintings and bare walls might ever be. But the few pieces of furniture that were scattered through the generous rooms were real furniture, mahogany of a sort that one rarely ever sees in shops or auction-rooms, the canvases that occasionally relieved those bare walls were paintings that would have graced even sizeable public collections. The dinner was simple—compared with New York standards—but the hospitality was generous, even still compared with the standards of New York. To that informal dinner had been bidden a group of Boston men and women fairly representative of the town, a Harvard professor of real renown, the editor of an influential daily newspaper, a barrister of national reputation, a sociologist whose heart has gone toward her work and made that work successful. These folk, exquisite in their poise because of their absolute simplicity, discussed the issues of the moment—the city's progress in the playground movement, the possibilities of minimum wage laws, the tragic devotion of Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter to woman suffrage. In New York a similar group of folk similarly gathered would have discussed the newest and most elaborate of hotels or George M. Cohan's latest show.
It is this very quality that makes Boston so different—and so delightful. She may look like a cleanly London, as she often boasts—with her sober streets of red brick—and yet she still remains, despite the great changes that have come to pass in the character of her people within the past dozen years—a really American town. A few hours of study of the faces upon the streets and in the public conveyances will confirm this. And perhaps it is this very fact that makes a certain, well-known resident of the Middle West come to Boston once or twice each year without any purpose than his own announced one of dwelling for a few days within a "really civilized community."
*****
We well remember our first visit to Boston some—twenty years ago. We came over the Boston & Albany railroad down into the old station in Kneeland street. For it was before the day that those two mammoth and barnlike terminals, the North and the South stations, had been built. In those days the railroad stations of Boston expressed more than a little of her personality—even the dingy ark of the Boston & Maine which thrust itself out ahead of all its competitors along Causeway street and reached into Haymarket square. The Providence station in Park square and the Lowell and the Albany stations bespoke in pretentious architecture something of the importance and elegance of those three railroads, while as for the gray stone castellated station of the Fitchburg railroad—that sublimated passenger-house made timid travelers almost feel that they were gazing at the East portal of the Hoosic tunnel itself. It originally held a great hall—superimposed above the train-shed—and in that hall Jenny Lind sang when first she came to Boston. Afterwards it was decided that a concert hall over a noisy train-house was hardly a happy ingenuity and it was torn out. By that time, however, the Fitchburg station had taken its place in the annals of Boston.
But the Fitchburg railroad, even in its palmiest days, was never to be compared with "the Albany." Even the railroad to Providence, with its forty-five miles of well-nigh perfect roadbed, over which the trains thundered in fifty-five minutes, even a half century ago, was not to be mentioned in the same breath with the Boston & Albany. There was a railroad. And even if its charter did compel it to pay back to the commonwealth of Massachusetts every penny that it earned in excess of eight per cent. dividends upon its stock, that was not to be counted against it. It had never the least difficulty in earning more than that sum and, as far as we know, it never paid the state any money. But the commonwealth of Massachusetts did not lose. It gained a high-grade railroad—in the day when America hardly knew the meaning of such a term. The stations along "the Albany" were rare bits of architecture while the average railroad depot, even in good-sized towns, was a dingy, barnlike hole. It ripped out wooden and iron bridges by the dozens along its main line and branches and set the pace for the rest of the country by building stout stone-arch bridges—of the sort that last the centuries. These things, and many others, were typical of the road.
The Boston & Albany was unique in the fact that each stockholder who lived along its lines received as a yearly perquisite a pass to the annual meeting in Boston. The annual meetings were always well attended. Staid college professors, remembering the joys of Boston book shops, old ladies wearing black bombazine, tiny bonnets and prim expressions—all these and many others, too, looked forward to the annual meeting of their railroad as a child looks forward to Christmas.
This is not the time or place to discuss the vexatious railroad situation in New England, but it is worth while to note that when the New York Central railroad leased the Boston & Albany—a little more than a dozen years ago—and began blotting out the familiar name upon the engines and the cars, a wave of sentimental anger swept over Boston that it had hardly known since it had inflamed over slavery and laid the foundations for the greatest internecine conflict that the world has ever known. Boston held no quarrel with the owners of the New York Central—if they would only not disturb the traditions of its great railroad. But the owners of the New York Central did not understand. It was not them. It was that word "New York" being blazoned before Boston eyes that was making the trouble. The old town had seen the Boston & Providence and then, horror of horrors, the New England disappear before a railroad that called itself the New York, New Haven & Hartford. And after these the offense was being created against its pet railroad—the Boston & Albany.
The other day the New York Central saw a great light. And in that mental brilliancy it gave back to Boston its old railroad. As this is being written "Boston & Albany" is reappearing upon whole brigades of engines and regiments of freight and passenger cars. A friendly sentiment, reared in traditions, has not been slow to show its appreciation of the act of the railroad in New York. And the men in charge of the great consolidation of the other railroads east of the Hudson river have not been slow to follow in their action. They have announced that they plan to build their railroads into one great system called the "New England Lines." It begins to look as if, after all these years, they have begun to read the Boston mind.